I’ve been around guns all my life, but only picked up an earnest interest in them as a hobby since 2003. In that time, the internet landscape for Canadian shooters has grown, and I’d argue that we’ve got a couple of really cool outlets considering our population. So where do you go to get more gun talk (other than this website, of course 😉 **Update Oct, 2021: I’ve removed any media that hasn’t been active in the last year and updated some info.**
Best Canadian Gun Forums
CanadianGunNutz is the most obvious one and bears mentioning the first. The simple look of vBulletin may fool you, but this site hosts thousands of visitors per day and is likely the most popular firearms forum in Canada. Unlike many of the websites in Canada, this one is very well recognized by retailers and manufacturers, many of whom engage to some extent on the forum. While most threads are somewhat civilized and mostly intelligent, other threads are chock full of trolls, completely uninformed, brand lovers, brand haters, and extremely knowledgeable gun owners all thrown into the same mix. There isn’t really a decent way of getting around this problem with a traditional forum, you need comment voting and threading to properly sort the great comments from the . . .not so insightful ones.
The Equipment Exchange on CGN is free and awesome. Seasoned buyers and sellers on the “EE” will pay via EMT quickly and ship quickly. Be forewarned that if you want to sell or buy on the EE, you’ll need to match these high expectations. This is not Kijiji or Craigslist.
If you’re on Reddit and want to talk guns, head on over to /r/canadaguns and join us! The voted post + comments system is completely superior to the traditional forum style. If you’re on Discord, there’s a link to the CanadaGuns discord channel from the Reddit sub.
Gun Owners of Canada is fairly new and has yet to hit the number of users that CGN has, but they’ve got some really cool contests and some good people in the forums. It’s notably less “tinfoil hat” than CGN can be.
Alberta Outdoorsmen Forum also does thousands of visitors every day (actually, they usually have thousands of users on the site at any given time.) Also run on vBulletin, the Alberta Outdoorsmen forum is backed by the Alberta Outdoorsmen Magazine. This forum is less categorized as CGN, so it can be harder to find interesting topics if you’re focused on a particular theme. Great if you’re in Alberta, still not so bad if you’re not. I’ve seen a few sellers from other provinces successfully selling their items on this forum.
Best Canadian Podcasts
- Slam Fire Radio. I’ve been a host on this podcast since 2015
- Canadian Patriot Podcast shoots their shows live with booze on YouTube.
- CCFR Podcast
- New Shooter Canada focuses on Canadian-specific content and offers excellent overviews for beginners.
- Rimfire Nation is a newer podcast that my Mapleseed buddy and rimfire PRS aficionado Rick hosts
- The Silvercore Podcast
- Calibre podcast is a brand new (as of this writing) podcast by the owners of Calibre magazine
Best Canadian Gun Magazines
The best Canadian Gun Magazine? There are a couple. Calibre is great quality, and it’s available at most decent gun shops. I hate leafing through American gun magazines and looking at all the guns I can’t own, in configurations that would be restricted here, or meeting requirements over there that we don’t have here (pistol vs SBR, bullet buttons, and other nonsense.) Calibre’s on the cutting edge of what’s new in Canadian firearms, and had a T97 review at a time when there was only really 1 sample in the country. Their new website is at http://www.calibremag.ca/
High Capacity Magazine is produced with the CCFR.
The Canadian Firearms Journal is the NFA’s magazine.
Canadian Gun Blogs
Canadian YouTube Gun Channels
Note: I haven’t watched all of these channels.
- Arm and Gun 1.82M subs
- Runkle of the Bailey 208,000 sub
- British Muzzleloaders 80,700 subs
- 314299 56,000 subs
- Marstar Canada 44,200 subs
- The Civil Advantage 43,800 subs
- CCFR Channel 39,400 subs
- MDT 32,100 subs
- Hunting Gear Guy 30,400 subs
- Tactical Imports 18,900 subs
- RifleChair 12,900 subs
- GunGeek 10,300 subs
- Silvercore 8,730 subs
- vkyle91x 5,710 subs
- Womfat 7,150 subs
- Wolverine Supplies 5,210 subs
- Canadian Hunter 4,990 subs
- Yukon12Gauge 4,130 subs
- Young Guns 3,270 subs
- Canadian Gear Addict 3,440 subs
- Precision Riflecraft 1,480 subs
- Slam Fire Radio 1,020 subs
- Canadian Patriot Podcast 892 subs
- Canadian Rimfire Precision Series 828 subs
- Project Mapleseed 550 subs
- Carleton University Firearms Association 686 subs
- CanadaGuns Talk show 415 subs
- Tyson Goes Outside 256 subs
- Maritime Marksman 112 subs
- Canadian University Shooting Federation 101 subs
(subscriber counts updated August, 2022. I also pulled out some inactive channels)
If you know of other great Canadian sources of information online or off that I should include, let me know in the comments below!